Nuremburg
Trip Start
Jul 01, 2008
1
8
13
Trip End
Jul 31, 2008
Nuremberg,
Bavaria,
Germany
Sunday, July 13, 2008
We walked along the monolithic architechtural sites created by Albert Speer for the annual rally of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (the NSDAP or, as we lay-people say it, the Nazi Party).
FYI:
Nationalsozialistische is a German compound word that means "national socialsim", or a set of national programs that, basically, provide basic needs for a country's citizens (food, water, maybe shelter, but certainly a job in an, idealistically, stable economy that would an allow an individual to work that stuff out on his or her own). Deutsche is the German word for, well, "German". Another compound word (in this language the Germans link together two or more words all the time to create useful meanings that sometimes spread across pages or need to be creatively abbreviated on street signs), Arbeiterpartei, means "worker's party".
I remember "arbeiter" from the wrought-iron letters welded onto the barred gates that welcomed prisoners to the Sachsenhausen concentration and death camp several miles north of Berlin: "Arbeit macht frei", work makes you free. Boy, did that have a sinister set of connotations...
Sachsenhausen...
...the training camp from 1933 for the SS, Hitler's elite guard. This is where the SS learned to humiliate, work to death, experiment upon, gas, millions in other camps across Europe. Sachsenhausen did the worst, first. They hung people up like the Spanish Inquisition (a prisoners arms were put behind his back and he was hung that way, excruciating pain and eventual dislocation of the shoulders and elbows). They played extremely loud classical music in the camp, then led selected prisoners to a specially constructed pit outside the walls to shoot 70-100 political prisoners at a time. The SS experimented with carbon-monoxide on Russian prisoners here; then, as Jews began to fill the camp, with a gas called Zyclon-B, an insecticide used by German warehouses to keep roach populations at bay. Zyclon-B became the gas of choice at Aushwitz, Treblinka, Dachau, Mathausen, and Buchenwald...
...lastly, the SS learned, during the mass extermination years from 1940 to 1945, how to cover their tracks. They burned bodies day after day; sometimes, and I wish was lying, thousands a day. It was prisoners who would pick up the bodies after whatever method of execution; prisoners who would yank out the gold teeth, collect bifocals; prisoners who would stuff the naked bodies of, maybe, their friends into the furnaces several at a time. After about five or six burnings, the ash receptacles would be full and these same prisoners on crematorium detail would empty the ashes of their comrades outside the prison walls. We walked along those grounds yesterday, I kid you not. We walked upon the remains of thousands of German political prisoners, German homosexuals, the mentally retarded, the physically handicapped, Russian soldiers, Polish soldiers, Eastern European Jews, and who knows how many other categories.
There's grass growing there now...
Anyway, today I was videotaping for Elaine on the old Nazi rally grounds; you know, the ones that you see in the nightmarish clips of Hitler in front of hundreds of thousands of Germans with their arms raised, and umpteen thousand Nazi flags flapping in the wind...
...well, unbelievably enough, I was there today. Was I proud? It's really macabre, but I have to admit I was. That's pretty horrifying to admit out loud, isn't it? I mean does it make me as bad as the people that swallowed the Nazi propaganda? Here's the thing: two hours later, I saw a film in the Nuremburg Documentation Center and there was ol' Adolf, walking across this concrete slab, in front of these flashpots, these burning flames, the same exact pillars where I had been filming earlier... I mean I walked in the exact footsteps maybe...AAAAAAGGGGGHHHHH!!! WHAT'S WRONG WITH ME???? It's like I'm Luke Skywalker about to go over to the Dark Side of the Force!! What is the fascination? What is the pull of this cult of personality that draws me like a moth to a flame, to the power of this monster, whose plans for world domination drastically changed the lives of more than 100 million people?!
The simply outstanding exhibit at the Nuremburg Documentation Center, an architectural masterpiece combining old and new, avant' garde construction forms is entitled, "Nuremburg: Fascination & Terror". This museum could not have summed up my feelings in a more succinct manner. The exhibits (interpreted via a personal sound device available in several languages) covered the history of Nuremburg, explained the construction of the humongous granite sites, and discussed the composition of the annual week-long rallies that infused Nuremburg with thousands upon thousands of swastika-flecked tourists between 1927 and 1938. As well, the exhibit ended with an extensive bit on the Nuremburg Trials, the first global litigation against a world power and it's citizens for crimes against humanity.
There was also a section on the European work camps, stories concerning the hapless prisoners who dropped like flies from the bestial conditions they encountered in the granite quarries. These prisoners of war, "enemies of the state", Jews, Gypsies, and a host of other Nazi targets, literally worked on crusts of bread, clear broth, and very little water, until they died from exhaustion; all for the Nazi rally grounds that were abandoned before construction was finished once Germany attacked Poland, September 1st, 1940 to start the war. Sad... ...very sad.
There are plenty of older people here in Nuremburg. People who would have been alive when General Patton's tanks first rolled into town. I wish I could speak German well enough to ask a thousand questions. The Americans would have seen an ancient town obliterated by allied bombing. The films of 1945 Nuremburg that I saw today were simply haunting. There was literally not one building that didn't have at least two of its walls reduced to rubble. And this is a town a little smaller than Portland, Maine. What would these natives of "the most German of German towns" have to say? Was it worth it to be the cultural centerpiece of the Third Reich? For over a decade these people had been high-living burghers in the most important small-town in Europe.
